Secure-24 fuels business growth with EMC

Nov 19, 2009

EMC has announced that Secure-24, a leading provider of managed hosting, disaster recovery and managed services to large and mid-sized organisations, has standardised its data backup operations on an EMC virtual tape library solution to increase the speed and efficiency of its rapidly growing backup operations.

Volker Straub, Secure-24’s chief operating officer, says: “We have experienced steady growth year after year based on our success with delivering peace of mind to our customers. Companies outsource their highly critical applications to us so they can reduce their operational costs, achieve compliance more successfully, and fast-forward key projects. EMC’s scalable and flexible infrastructure has helped us grow by enabling us to efficiently and reliably support customers around the globe with cutting-edge Service Level Agreements.”Based in Michigan, Secure-24 selected EMC Disk Library 4200 and EMC NetWorker software as its virtual tape library (VTL) solution over other vendors. The company uses an EMC CLARiiON CX infrastructure to help manage mission-critical ERP applications such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics. EMC supports Secure-24’s hosted customer environments as well as its internal operations at Secure-24 data centres across the US.“We made a strategic decision to strengthen the scalability and flexibility of our storage environment, especially as our backup environment increased sevenfold in the past year alone,” says Scott McIsaac, Secure-24’s storage lead. “We evaluated solutions from other vendors, but found that we really liked EMC’s reporting, backup speed and overall usability. EMC‘s virtual tape library was more mature and really enhanced our process flow.” Secure-24 standardised its physical and virtual tape operations on the EMC Disk Library and NetWorker. The EMC Disk Library has increased Secure-24’s backup capacity by an average of 67% and reduced backup time by 43%. “We’ve lowered our total cost of ownership,” said McIsaac. “We need less storage for backups and EMC’s solution is a much more automated, reliable process so we’re also saving staff time.” Before deploying the EMC VTL, Secure-24 engaged EMC Global Services to analyse its backup environment and recommended various options for improving backup performance, reliability and efficiency. EMC also shared best practices for deploying and running VTL operations.McIsaac notes: “Working with EMC Global Services sped up the process of identifying opportunities to increase the efficiency of our backup environment. Incorporating EMC’s recommendations not only improved the quality of our implementation, but we’ve retooled our backup environment for greater scalability and more efficient growth.”To support customers with high data availability requirements, Secure-24 relies on EMC MirrorView software to replicate data across geographically dispersed data centres. MirrorView has enabled Secure-24 to deliver disaster recovery and business continuity services with a lower Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Additionally, Secure-24 used VMware virtualisation software to consolidate and protect its servers as virtual machines residing on CLARiiON. Straub says: “As a certified SAP hosting partner, we’re expected to satisfy the demand for the highest levels of performance, reliability and scalability in SAP environments. We standardised on EMC so we can provide our SAP and other clients with access to the industry’s most advanced technologies for data replication, storage, backup and virtualisation.”McIssac adds: “EMC is a name that all our clients can stand behind. It’s been very stable for us and has helped us grow. We’ve leveraged EMC technology for nine years and we have never had an outage.”